Microsoft's announcement last week that it will offer a new software development platform for cloud computing added new energy to the debate over how and when organizations might begin turning to the technology.

Microsoft today articulated how it will bridge PCs and mobile devices with an extraordinary blitz of announcements that included the first demonstration of Windows 7, its Live Framework, a bevy of new offerings for developers including WPF support for Visual Studio, and the first preview of Office 14.

As Microsoft readies pre-release bits for its Professional Developers Conference later this month, the company's Connected Services division today announced key components of its "Oslo" modeling platform.

Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is conducting a private beta test of Microsoft's server products running on Amazon's hosted computing platform, which is called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Microsoft is revealing more about its plans for the next generation of Visual Studio Team System (code-named Rosario), part of the now officially named Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 rollout.